Legible Heavens, H. L. Hix
About the Author
H. L. Hix has published an anthology, Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation (2004), and six books of poetry and literary criticism with Etruscan, including Shadows of Houses (2005), Chromatic (2006), God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse (2007), Legible Heavens (2008), Incident Light (2009), and As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry (2002). He has two more books forthcoming from Etruscan, First Fire, Then Birds (2010) and Lines of Inquiry (2011). His seven other books include Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory (State University of New York Press, 1995) and translations of Estonian and Lithuanian poetry.
In addition to having been a finalist for the National Book Award for Chromatic, his awards include the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Peregrine Smith Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the Kansas Arts Commission, and the Missouri Arts Council. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, taught at Kansas City Art Institute, and was an administrator at The Cleveland Institute of Art, before accepting his current position as professor in the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Wyoming. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and at Shanghai University.
Find out more about H.L. Hix on his author page.
 |
| List Price: |
“… untroubled authority…and the talent to make us weep” —Dan Chiasson, Poetry
“Hix has written the most important poetic sequences published by an American poet during the last several decades. He is the most interesting American poet writing today, the least predictable and the most challenging.” —David Caplan, Pleiades
Legible Heavens explores what the most intimate forms of experience reveal about our most cosmic concerns, and vice versa. Its four sequences act like compass points to orient a human landscape. On one axis, “Star Chart for the Rainy Season” laments love lost, appealing to the biblical assertion that “love is stronger than death, and passion more cruel,” in contrast to “Material Implication,” which celebrates love found, in sonnets of desire insistently “glowing against the dusk. ” On the other axis, “All the One-Eyed Boys in Town” treats love as perdition, the speaker imagining his life as “a match scratched down your wingbones,” in contrast to “Synopsis,” which treats love as salvation, reinscribing the biblical gospels (canonical and apocryphal alike) to “solicit a miracle I must not expect.”
H. L. Hix has published five books of poetry, a book of literary criticism, and an anthology with Etruscan, and has two more books forthcoming. He teaches in the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Wyoming. His awards include the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Peregrine Smith Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the Kansas Arts Commission, and the Missouri Arts Council.
Publication date: March 2009
Read an excerpt of Legible Heavens.
